A 24 year old Computer Science major and all of the video game related things that come to mind through life

Saturday, January 1, 2011

Fallout: New Vegas. Masochist mode!

Yes, that really does say masochist mode. I beat New Vegas and earned every achievement. I've now got every achievement for both the 360 fallout games. This is awesome, but it means there isn't a lot left to push me to play the game through, again. I've beaten it in hardcore mode, and with no xp boost there is no real reason to play it in very hard. Plus it just means your guns are nerfed beyond all reason. So I decided to play it in a new mode. I sat down and made a mental list of all the things that I found too easy with the fallout games.
-too much ammo
-too much health (by which I mean a mass of health packs)
-vats makes dealing with most enemies much easier
Now how can I limit my ammo and health? Hardcore mode really helped, but I can still walk around with infinite stimpacks (I just realized I called them Stempacks all through my last post. I feel like an idiot) and can still have plenty of ammo. So I then came up with a list to "fix" these things. I don't ever want to see this mode put into a game, but I'd suggest at least trying it. I've found it to be quite refreshing.
-game on meduim. This is the perfect balance of my weapons doing good damage and being dealt damage.
-play on hardcore. This goes without saying. it's mostly for the slower working stimpacks though.
-never barter. That means no buying, and no selling. (more on this later).
-never quick travel. (yeah, I gave up on this one pretty fast).
-no repairing items, except with repair kits or paying someone in the wasteland to do it.

So now I can't barter. I decided to allow myself to barter for weapon mods as well as for primers (not for gun powder or cases). But when I do that I have to pay in caps, not items. This means that you can't simply have a mass of bottle caps to buy thousands of rounds of 5.56mm. This also means that you never pick up anything you don't need. As well as making you drop things a lot more often. You can pay people caps for services. Like doctors or bribes. But since you can't sell items you won't have a mass of caps just sitting in reserve for things like this. 50 caps to heal your limbs etc will be a pretty big deal when you don't even have a 500.

The idea behind this was that it would make it more realistic. If I want to go here, I need to take to 20 minutes or so to run there. I decided to not do the first time I got crippled and lacked any more doctors bags. I don't want to spend 30 minutes hobbling to a doctor. And about the 3rd time I got my limbs crippled in combat I decided I had made the right choice. If you can stick with this one, more power to you. I might decided to do it once I get the reduced limb damage perk and some better armor.

This one is the biggest pain in the ass. Period. You end up dropping so many pistols and rifles because you can't sell the spares, and you can't use them to repair your current one. So I'll keep 2, at best. To try and keep my damage as high as possible. I try and keep them in decent shape with the weapon repair kits (which are the main reason to get your repair high) but it only does so much. You can only find so many wrenches in the wasteland to loot. Where this really kills me is armor though. I can't repair armor with those little kits. So I end up having to just deal with the best I can get off of a dead raider. I can pay to have my armor repaired, but it costs a lot to repair armor from an NPC. And a lot is a lot more money than I have. So you really take a lot more damage than you normally would (thus making the game more of challenge).

If you give this a try be sure to tell me how it works for you. It has really changed the game for me, to say the least. I've really loved it, but as I said it isn't something I'd really want to see put into the game as a mode. Repairing guns is a lot of fun! I love being able to fast travel and barter and repair limbs with stimpacks. But if you've played the game 5 times and still want to get a bit more out of the game, I think this mode will give you at least one more play through. And if you decide not to fast travel, it's going to be one long play through.